


Electric Dreams

by Meatball42



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel) - All Media Types
Genre: Abuse, Acceptance, Alternate Universe - Robots & Androids, Body Horror, Communication, Corpses, Dark, Friendship, Gen, Hope, Hopeful Ending, Horror, Nightmares, POV Alternating, POV Second Person, POV Third Person, Trick or Treat: Trick
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-11-08
Updated: 2019-11-08
Packaged: 2020-11-29 09:10:46
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,966
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20961194
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Meatball42/pseuds/Meatball42
Summary: “You’re not one of them, thoseAvengers. You’re one ofmine. You just need to be reminded.”





	Electric Dreams

**Author's Note:**

  * For [flipflop_diva](https://archiveofourown.org/users/flipflop_diva/gifts).

_ Do you dream? _

_ Yes. You do. _

  


You dream about being held against a rack with your arms behind your back, fighting and screaming, until there’s a buzz of electricity and your body falls still. A man in a white coat approaches you and reaches for your neck. Something clicks, the world tilts, and you’re looking at his feet as he walks your head away from your body.

You wake up, and the silent screaming fades away. You’ve sweated through your blankets. You get up, take a shower, all the while telling yourself that it’s just a nightmare. You remind yourself that Clint forced everyone to watch Robocop a few weeks ago, and that you’ve been having strange and terrible thoughts ever since. This is just the latest, and you resolve to kick Clint’s ass on the mats tomorrow.

You head to the kitchen, where Steve is up late, sketching. He smiles to see you, but it fades at what is surely your pale and drawn visage. Thankfully, he knows better than to address it directly.

“Coffee?”

You manage a smile. “Please.”

You talk about Thor’s latest obsession, roller derbies, and drink coffee together. Steve mentions a trip to the museum tomorrow and invites you. You say yes.

“Feeling better?” he asks when you finish your drink.

“Yeah. Thanks,” you say, and it’s even mostly true. “Gonna head back.”

“Good night, Nat.”

“You too.”

You lay on the couch in your living room until you fall back to sleep, a late-night cooking show on in the background.

The next morning you’re awoken by the Avengers alarm and head for the top floor. You gear up quickly and board the Quinjet alongside the others. It’s a long flight to Europe, even with the Quinjet’s speed, and you find yourself increasingly unsettled. You look around, and the others all seem very far away.

Clint sits beside you. “Everything okay, Tasha?”

You never got to beat him up one last time for exposing you to Robocop. Some deep, terrified part of you is certain you never will. The thought trickles around the edges of your mind, which is racing now from an unidentified stressor.

“I’ve got a bad feeling about this.”

Clint earns your love for the hundredth time by nodding seriously at this baseless fear.

You arrive at an ancient castle in Eastern Europe where the reports of potential Hydra activity originated. The team has a standard plan for infiltration, but it quickly goes awry. The enemy has an army of soldiers, all stronger and faster than they should be, resisting the Avengers’ attempts to defeat or rout them. You manage to slip through their ranks to the castle: somehow, though they mercilessly attack your teammates, the soldiers never seem to notice you.

You make your way to the inner sanctum and begin hacking into the enemy’s computers. You are sure by now that this is not a Hydra base, but the stronghold of some other organization. You don’t know why it till feels familiar, but the fear has risen to coat the back of your throat.

Your heart pounds in your chest. You want to leave.

And that is when a man in a white coat steps out of nowhere to face you.

You go still. Ice runs down your entire body.

It’s the man from your dream.

“N4T4L14,” he greets, and somehow you know exactly how he means it. “I knew you would return to me one day. My first and greatest creation.”

You try to run. Soldiers armed with high powered tasers enter from every door to the room.

“You forget yourself, NT4L14,” the man croons. He’s crazy. “You’re not one of them, those _ Avengers._ You’re one of _mine_. You just need to be reminded.”

* * *

Whatever these guys are made of, it isn’t normal human juice. Clint smashes one of the soldiers in the face with his polycarbonate bow, hard enough to crack the skull of a normal man, and this guy just gets right back up. He’s grinning with absent eyes, all of them are. It’s intensely creepy. But Clint wouldn’t have made it as a SHIELD agent if he couldn’t handle intensely creepy.

“They’re robots,” Steve pants over the coms. “Electricity can take them out.”

“Roger that,” Clint says gratefully. He sets all of his arrows to the taser setting. No wonder he wasn’t getting anywhere with the poison-tipped arrows. He aims for the eye sockets.

With the new intel, it doesn’t take long to beat their way through the entrance. Steve makes it in first and Clint is hot on his tail. They cover each others’ backs. Stark stays back to figure out something about the base’s surveillance. Thor heads off to corral Hulk and get him aimed in the right direction again. Clint and Steve aim deeper into the facility.

Nat’s not answering on the com. Clint tells himself it’s down to the bug Stark’s looking into.

They make it to the center of the castle, a cold hallway of stone with some sort of scientific set-up. Lots of computers, lots of racks for equipment. It reminds Clint of a mechanic’s garage. Except, you know, eviller.

They split up to clear it, and find the mad scientist at about the same time. 

A dozen of the robot-soldiers circle a man in a white lab coat doing something to another one of the robots that’s hung up on a frame. This one doesn’t look like a human like the others; it’s full-on skinless Terminator. Clint wonders what happened to its skinsuit and then makes himself not think about it.

The scientist is digging about in the robot’s chest by its neck and doesn’t notice them. The soldier-bots don’t seem to see them either. There’s also no sign of Natasha. Clint swallows and forces himself to wait on Cap’s orders instead of tearing off to find her.

And then one of the soldiers suddenly spots them and Clint’s drawing and firing his taser arrows, fast and smooth, all ease of practice. These bots are tougher than the ones outside. It takes two arrows to put each one down, and they’re much faster than their robot comrades. 

Clint’s starting to feel a little casually worried about running out of arrows when Steve manages to bounce his shield off one of the bots and nail the mad scientist right in the back of the head, since he hadn’t even looked up from his work. When he goes down, the soldiers falter, and that’s all Steve and Clint need to finish them off.

And then reinforcements arrive, for both sides.

Iron Man’s repulsors melt the incoming soldiers to slag, but if their legs work, they keep coming, like some sort of melted plastic zombies. Hulk smashes them and they twitch, trying to claw themselves back into the fight. Thor zaps a whole row of them at once, but these ones twitch and reset and keep coming.

Clint finds his position overrun and he falls back, and back, toward the edge of the room. He doesn’t notice the pit until it’s almost too late.

His foot slips and he catches himself. He makes the mistake of looking down over the long, long drop and sees a distant pile of corpses. Some of them are metal, but some of them look like humans. Some of them are visibly rotting.

A soldiers rushes him. Clint takes it down, a taser arrow in each eye, but the arrows have a split second of delay before they go off, and it’s just enough time for the bot to push him backwards.

He’s weightless for a horrible moment, vertigo taking over as he falls backwards.Then something clamps around his wrist and his shoulder lights up as all of his weight lands on the joint, his body swinging with the full force of his momentum. He slams against the side of the pit and screams as something in his shoulder tears.

He looks up and nearly jumps down into the pit of his own accord.

The robot from the rack is holding him up. Without the skinsuit the others have, it’s a gruesomely realistic metal skull, shiny, with glowing green eyes that don’t blink. Its fingers, its arm, are cords of tubing and wires, metal struts and tiny diode boards. It’s terrifying.

It's saved his life.

It shifts, and Clint realize that its other arm, the forearm pressed to the floor right outside the pit is shaking with the effort of holding him up. He can see its shoulder jerk, trying to maintain the position.

Well, he hasn’t exactly got anything to lose right here. His bow is still clenched in his left hand. He tosses it up so it lands on the even ground behind the Terminator and starts the careful work of pushing himself up against the wall with one hand and his feet. The robot moves gracefully, pulling Clint up and out as he pushes upwards.

He lays on the ground, panting with exertion, and it watches him, unmoving. Clint has no idea what to make of it, but he nods in the direction of the fight. His teammates are still in need of support, and he’s down the use of one arm.

“Wanna help out?”

It nods. Clint shrugs and pulls out a gun. “Okay then, you take the left, I’ll take the right.”

The skinless robot is very good at fighting the soldier-bots. It has incredible reflexes and it seems to know exactly where to hit, even though it’s physically smaller than the soldiers. The fighting style looks familiar to Clint, but bullets don’t work very well on these things, so he’s kinda distracted.

Stark gets into the mainframe and takes what they need. Cap sounds the retreat.

The robot follows Clint toward their exit, clearing their path with the ease of someone who’s worked with law enforcement before. Clint wonders what the thing’s history is, but getting outside is the priority. When they do, he directs them on the safe path to the QuinJet, still keeping an eye out for unfriendlies. 

It occurs to him that this might not be a good plan. The thing helped the Avengers and doesn’t seem to be hostile, but that doesn’t mean Stark will let it on his precious plane, or that Steve will just take Clint’s word for it that the robot is safe. 

“I don’t know if you can come with,” he tells it warily. 

It holds its arm up toward him, elbow bent, hand toward the sky, and points at its own wrist.

Clint feels his heart skip a beat when he recognize Natasha’s Widow’s Bite.

* * *

  


Clint is quick on the uptake. Once he gets over his shock, he quickly turns to suspicion, like a good spy, and asks you several identifying questions. You sign out the answers in rusty finger-spelling, or by using gestures the both of you know.

He believes you, eventually. He looks devastated, but he believes you.

“Okay. Do you… need to get anything from inside?”

He looks down your body. At. The metal. The. Where you looked like a human. You can’t even think about it.

You carefully spell out ‘D-E-S-T-R-O-Y-E-D.’

Clint nods slowly. “Okay. Better get going, then.”

The two of you walk toward the QuinJet. Your mind races. How will you explain this to the other Avengers? Will they believe it? Will they attack you? If they do, will Clint fight on your side? If they do believe it’s you… what then?

You jolt out of it as Clint bumps his shoulder into yours.

“Lighten up in there, okay? I can practically hear the gears grinding.”

He grins at his own joke. You don’t have a face to smile back with, but it does make you feel just a bit better.


End file.
